Sports world falls silent

From stadiums and diamonds to ovals and fairways, sports will take a break this weekend to allow people to recall and recover from the devastation wrought by terrorist attacks.

The NFL canceled all 15 games of Week 2, saying it was a time to mourn. Major league baseball, several auto racing circuits, college football conferences and the country's largest soccer league all called off events. So did the PGA Tour and the LPGA.

''We in the National Football League have decided that our priorities for this weekend are to pause, grieve and reflect,'' NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Thursday. ''It is a time to tend to families and neighbors and all those wounded by these horrific acts of terrorism.''

Some colleges and auto racing circuits had wanted to go on, hoping to ''bring our people together,'' but those decisions were reversed in many cases.

''It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out sporting events are absolutely meaningless compared with what's going on in Washington and New York,'' St. Louis slugger Mark McGwire said.

They were distracted. They didn't want to fly. Some said they wouldn't have played even if the rest of the league did. And they said so.

''It would've been hard to overlook everything that happened in favor of a game,'' Detroit Lions wide receiver Herman Moore said. ''If we had to get on a plane this weekend, I wouldn't go.''

The NFL said it would decide later whether to reschedule its games or go with a shortened season. The decision by the NFL, which was criticized for playing two days after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, had been widely anticipated.

Since Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, baseball had wiped out six days of play with 212 weeks to go in the regular season. Thursday's decision to cancel all games until Monday will raise the total of postponed games to 91, the most since nearly the entire final month of the 1918 season was canceled.

''You can't have a stadium full of people having fun,'' Cardinals second baseman Fernando Vina said, ''because that's not what this is about now.''

Commissioner Bud Selig said he wanted to maintain a 162-game schedule, which will allow Barry Bonds to still have a shot at breaking McGwire's record of 70 home runs.

''I believe that extra week will not be harmful,'' Selig said. ''I worry about weather in October. Fortunately, we have a lot of warm-weather teams, a lot of West Coast teams.''

Baseball intends to make up all the games by extending the regular season, which had been scheduled to end Sept. 30. The games will be rescheduled for the week of Oct. 1. That could push the conclusion of the World Series into November.

When the weekend's sports lineup was wiped out, so were hundreds of hours of live sports programming, erased from national and local TV schedules. Americans will have to find other diversions.

''It's kind of like a church on Sundays for America to watch the NFL,'' Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said. ''The church on this Sunday should not be about cheering for one team over another. It should be supporting all the victims and their family and friends.''

Some networks will give the time to their news departments or affiliates for reports on rescue and cleanup operations from Tuesday's destruction.

''A specific determination of what will be aired has not been made yet,'' NBC Sports vice president Kevin Sullivan said. ''It will not be sports.''

ABC spokesman Mark Mandel said: ''We will be dark from the sports side of things.''

CBS, though, will fill one hour Saturday and four hours Sunday with taped sports programming, including a special on Lance Armstrong's third straight Tour de France victory in July.

ESPN, an all-sports network, lost the largest amount of live programming, with more than 50 hours. Fox and its cable arm, Fox Sports Net, lost more than 20 hours of nationally broadcast sports programs; ABC more than 15, CBS more than 10, and NBC 91/2.

''There is a financial implication,'' Fox Sports vice president Lou D'Ermilio said, ''but it pales in comparison to what's happening in New York and Washington.''

After the NFL announcement, the Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern conferences reversed field and postponed all of their college football games a day after announcing their teams would play.

They joined the Atlantic Coast, Big East and Pac-10 conferences in calling off games, meaning no major college football this Saturday.

''There was real anxiety as the week went on on the part of our football team about traveling by air,'' said Bowling Green athletic director Paul Krebs, whose school pulled out of a game at South Carolina a few hours before the SEC reversed course and called off its games.

The weekend's Winston Cup race at Loudon, N.H., was rescheduled for Friday, Nov. 23, only the second non-weather postponement in NASCAR's 53-year history.

''This is a time for families to come together,'' NASCAR president Mike Helton said Thursday. ''We felt that postponing this weekend's race was simply the right thing to do.''

Driver Jeff Burton said: ''Part of my emotions in this thing is that I want to make sure that the idiots that did this don't win. With all the pain that they've caused, we've got to make sure they don't win and that's part of me wanting to get back to normalcy.

''I want to just shove that back into the face of these idiots and show them that we are resilient.''

The Indy Racing League's season-ending race and a NASCAR truck race scheduled this weekend at Texas Motor Speedway were postponed for three weeks.

And Major League Soccer canceled the last six games of its regular season. Playoffs will begin Sept. 20.

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Friday, September 14, 2001.